“You know, we’ve got to put the safety of the delegates and guests first… you know, some of the background here is that we know the tropical storm or hurricane is far off the coast of Tampa, so it’s not a terribly hazardous situation, except, um, we couldn’t be asured that the buses coming across the bridges from Clearwater and St Pete would be safe with driving wind and rain. The second piece was the Secret Service took out all of the tenting outside of the forum. So what that meant was fewer entrances and our guests and delegates would be waiting outside in driving rain. The last thing is, obviously you can’t be assured what would happen on Monday, if you had a full arena and then couldn’t get people out of here. So, I mean, it’s an obvious choice… safety first.”

But that explanation varies greatly from Limbaugh's thoughts, as heard on his broadcast yesterday! Let's hear what the true head of the GOP had to say about Monday’s delay:

“…So this whole thing has been politicized, as the Democrats politicize everything, and that’s why we are talking about it. Now, I want to remind you: All last week… And, no, at no time here am I alleging a conspiracy. At no time. With none of this am I alleging conspiracy. All last week what was the target? Tampa. What was going on in Tampa this week?

The Republican National Convention. A pretty important one, too. Introducing the nominee, Mitt Romney. It’s only after the convention that Romney can actually start spending all of this money that he’s raised, so this convention is very important. It’s a chance to introduce Romney to a lot of people who don’t know him yet. And I noticed that the hurricane center’s track is — and I’m not alleging conspiracies here. The hurricane center is the regime; the hurricane center is the Commerce Department.

It’s the government.

It’s Obama.

And I’m noticing that that track stayed zeroed in on Tampa day after day after day. And the Republicans react to it accordingly over the weekend, canceling the first day of the convention. What could be better for the Democrats than the Republicans to cancel a day of this?

I’m sharing with you my thought process, ’cause I know full well that if you give these people the slightest chance and they’re gonna turn this into Katrina and they’re gonna scare the hell out of New Orleans and they’re gonna revive, “Bush doesn’t care about people” and revive all of it. They’re gonna politicize everything ’cause they do it. And now they had the model runs allowing them to do it.

Now they had these model runs allowing them to start scaring the hell out of people in New Orleans and make political connections to Bush.

Via C-SPAN: “Georgetown Law Center student Sandra Fluke testified about women’s health and contraception. She had been blocked from testifying at a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee the previous week on the 2010 health care law regulation requiring employers and insurers provide contraception coverage to their employees. Committee members noted that the previous hearing only had men as witnesses, leading Democratic leaders to call a separate hearing to let a woman’s voice be part of the discussion.”

“Following your rejection by the Republicans from the panel,” Pelosi declared, “we’ve heard from over 300,000 people saying we want women’s voices to be heard.”

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) went an order of magnitude higher. “You certainly speak for millions,” he said.

Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) revised that further. “I know you’re speaking for tens of millions of women,” she informed Fluke. “Can you think of any reason why [Issa] would be so adamant that your voice should not be heard?”

The DCCC had sent out a petition and fundraising e-blast earlier this week, that read in part:

“First, Republicans held a hearing on women’s access to birth control coverage with five men and NO WOMEN.

Now, In a last-minute move, House Republicans have apparently changed their own rules to prevent Congressional television cameras from filming the testimony of Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown law student that Republicans refused to let testify last week on women’s health issues.

We’re calling on Speaker Boehner, Majority Leader Cantor, and House Administration Committee Chairman Dan Lungren to immediately reverse their decision to deny Sandra the right to have her testimony televised.”

They did not. So the Democrats had to improvise, if they wanted the denied testimony to get out to the world.

Sandra Fluke was the lone witness at an unofficial Democratic-sponsored hearing. While the rest of the Capitol was mostly empty, Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, three other Democrats and dozens of mainly young women supporters crowded into a House office building room to applaud Fluke as she spoke of the importance of reproductive health care to women.

Prominently displayed by Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., was a photo of five religious leaders, all men and all appearing at the invitation of the Republican majority, testifying last week with Fluke visible in the background, sitting in the visitors’ section.

“We almost ought to thank the chairman (Rep. Darryl Issa, R-CA) for the lack of judgment he had,” in denying a seat to Fluke, Pelosi said.